Saturday, September 26, 2026

Caltech Welcomes New Students With a Lesson in Ignition

By EDDIE RIVERA

Future scientists, doctors, engineers, astronauts, physicists and futurists, gather for the fall 2026 Convocation at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium [Eddie Rivera/Pasadena Now]

At the Institute’s annual Convocation, President Ray Jayawardhana and fusion scientist Tammy Ma urged incoming students to embrace difficult problems, failure and the power of working together

Hundreds of new Caltech students streamed across Beckman Mall Friday morning, passing beneath an arch of orange, white and turquoise balloons before filing into Beckman Auditorium for a formal welcome to one of the world’s most demanding scientific communities.

Waiting inside was something considerably smaller.

Held aloft in a clear cylindrical display was a tiny fusion target — the kind of object that helped scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieve what had eluded researchers for generations: fusion ignition.

“This little target,” Caltech Class of 1985 alumna Tammy Ma told the students, holding it up. “This is what we turn into a star.” It was an apt centerpiece for Caltech’s 2026 Convocation, a ceremony about beginnings, difficult questions and what can happen when very small things are pushed to extraordinary limits.

Ma, director of the Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology and a member of the team behind the historic 2022 ignition breakthrough, delivered the keynote to incoming undergraduate and graduate students. She described the National Ignition Facility, where 192 lasers converge on a target containing deuterium and tritium fuel, creating temperatures several times hotter than the center of the sun.

But the morning was less a celebration of scientific triumph than a warning that triumph rarely arrives cleanly.

New Caltech President Ray Jayawardhana, himself beginning his first academic year at the Institute, told students that he and they shared an unusual bond: “I’m a first year too.”

Borrowing from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” he offered them two words for what lies ahead: “Don’t panic.”

Jayawardhana recalled first encountering Caltech as a high school student in Sri Lanka, when he wrote to Pasadena for information and received a spare black-and-white brochure carrying an arresting sentence: “Caltech is not for everyone.”

Decades later, he told the students, that remains true.

“But it is for you.”

His message repeatedly returned to curiosity — and particularly to the value of becoming a beginner again. He invoked physicist Richard Feynman’s excursions into biology, including experiments that failed, as evidence that discovery depends as much on intellectual wandering as expertise.

“Exploration is the path,” Jayawardhana said.

Ma’s story made the point more personally.

She told the students that during her own freshman year at Caltech, she struggled so badly that she printed transfer forms and sat crying in her Fleming House dorm room while filling them out.

She never mailed them.

What kept her at Caltech, she said, was the community around her — classmates who worked through difficult problem sets with her, taught her and struggled alongside her.

Years later, that lesson became science on a vastly larger scale. The paper announcing the first fusion ignition result had more than 1,000 authors.

“The thrill of discovery is amplified when it is shared,” Ma said.

That idea echoed through the morning. Kevin Gilmartin, Caltech’s vice president for student affairs and faculty dean of students, reminded the newcomers that the students beside them and the faculty and staff around them were “partners in this journey ahead.”

Outside afterward, the students strolled back to Beckman Mall for brunch. Their first official Caltech lesson was over: Aim extraordinarily high. Expect some experiments to fail. And when they do, look around. Help is right there.